Back home, the dark from the cornfield and the tracers of the laser pointer have settled into my spine. I keep from looking at anything for too long—the spoon rest on the oven, the paint-spattered radio on top of the fridge—just in case another dot appears. Sleep never works, so I settle on an all-night High School Frito Pace-Off.
The uncrumpling of the Fritos bag is loud, like announcing it to a racetrack. I set the bag on one end of the kitchen table and a glass of milk on the other. Then I walk a lap around the table, handful some chips into my mouth, and reach the glass of milk just as I’m done chewing.
“Nate?” someone says.
Fake Dad No. 3 velvets his way into the kitchen from the living room, bare legs under his purple bathrobe, Thor-mane in a ponytail.
“I was sleeping on the couch,” he says, leaning against the oven and thumb-knuckling the corner of his eye to uncrust it. “There was a great documentary on Lake Canandaigua. Canandaigua—do you know what that word means?”
Through the kitchen window, the sky milks up with pre-sunrise. He answers his own question. “It means ‘the chosen place.’ Isn’t that interesting? That we have a body of water that was regarded as ‘the chosen place?’”
I’m too busy Frito-chewing to even notice what he literally, actually says next: “You remind me of a story. One time, my friend Theebs, we called him that, he and I were camping in Nevada. He met a lady there, at the campgrounds, who had a prosthetic hand. Just two pincers to grip the phone when she talked girl-talk with her girlfriends. But Theebs, always seeking a connection, thought this lady was so ravishing, in the face, that he offered to smoke with her our hash, and she said she’d meet him later that night—with the caveat that love’s arbitrary yet fluid currents might bring them closer.”
I hear a coughing in the walls. The shower’s turning on: Mom.
“We’d already been drinking Carlo Rossi; already were in the bag,” he says. “So Theebs went out, met her, and returned to our tent nearly doubled over in pain.”
I wipe the salt on my pajama pants and, before I even think about why he’s telling me this, I admittedly admit that I’m sort of cracking up here. “Wait wait wait wait,” I go. “A Terminator Reacharound?”
Which, obviously, reminds me of something that happened both to Necro and Lip Cheese, and they know exactly what I’m talking about.
“That’s very funny,” Fake Dad No. 3 says. “A lot of richness.”
“That actually happened to your friend?”
“And me, too.” He reaches for his robe sash. “Would you care to see the scars?”
I whip my entire body away from him. “No! Don’t!”
“Kidding! You’re a pushover.” He crosses his ankles and his robe slides back past his right knee. “I know you think I’m the Homosexual Time Lord, or what not. But might I make you a proposition, Nate, which you are free to ignore.”
I pour myself a new glass of milk and down it like a shot. Since he’s already insulted much of himself for me, I say: “Okay, sure.”
“I’ve heard you talk on the phone to your friends, and I think you might find the loam of my offer to be particularly fertile. I have my chosen place, as well. Every summer, I go to a retreat, outside Philadelphia, near King of Prussia. Have you been—to King? of Prussia?”
“It’s named a king?”
“It’s a series of three-day retreats—although they offer longer engagements that intersplice multiple disciplines—in a confined, but wooded, natural creative space with yeomanic clearings, stone farmhouses amid the tall grass. It’s run through the Continual Center Foundation, which is world renowned, completely legitimate. The meditation technique is based on Vipassana—a twenty-five-hundred-year-old form of idea-incubation that means, loosely, truthful observation. It’s a way of eliminating war, eliminating suffering.” His right hand pans from his left arm outward across his body. “It would be challenging, excruciating. You wouldn’t be able to talk at all—except for obvious emergencies—but eventually, after multiple sessions and efforting toward an essence-forward life, you’d come out of it not needing to prove yourself to anyone. I donate very regularly there. And if you were interested in such a means of self-excavation, well, I could make that happen. We draw a ragtag band: everyone from ex-offenders to corporate executives. Yours for the low price of tender loving care!”
When I think of Pennsylvania, it reminds me of Greta Hollund, who I kind of liked even though I only saw her from across the cafeteria, and who wore plaid pants and had buttons on her book bag straps. She went to college in Philadelphia. When the kids go back to school every September, I’ll put “Hysteria” on repeat, in her honor or something, and I’ll do a Sad Archives Transfer, and re-rig my stomach to feel what I imagine she felt when she was younger. And I’ll imagine myself shrinking, like the thin white rectangle after you turn off an old TV, until I think to go do something else.
“Also—because I do walk the walk,” Fake Dad No. 3 says, reaching for the Frito bag, “I remember when I was monetarily and spiritually low. My first wife left me, so I blew five credit cards backpacking through South America. When I got back, I couldn’t find work. I was thirty-two. I moved into the basement of a house of grad students. All the dishes ended up in my room, because I was too depressed to carry them to the dishwasher when I finished eating. I tried to read self-help books, but self-help books are all written by people who are already successful, right? They would never need their own advice. And I couldn’t reconcile that. Finally, I went to King of Prussia, in 1989, for this retreat. Could you imagine if you knew that several times a year you didn’t have to talk to anybody? I almost moved there for it.”
“But, so, why Mom?” I say.
He looks toward the ceiling and sighs. “That’s an astute question,” he says, because he says every question is a good question. “Debra commits herself. Gary: Did you take your Donnatal? Are you transferring your medical records? You have meditation on Tuesday, not Monday.”
“I feel like I can never complain about anything with her,” I tell him.
“I can’t speak for that,” he says. “But I can say, us guys, you and me,”—he nudges his elbow at me—“the other night, alone, at my apartment, I called GE to walk me through how to use the washing machine in my own complex’s basement. Men won’t spend their money; men will count the pasta noodles she bought before she left us.”
Which, okay, is about a 4.1 on the Scale of Funny.
“The retreat would be free. It’d be in the summer. It would be an intense challenge. But a chance, for the mind.”
“I would have to think about it.”
Because I begin to feel something as this conversation ends. And the last time I felt it was when Real Dad drove all the way to Fairport so we could go sledding at Brooks Hill, which had the best sledding hill in Rochester. It was Super Bowl Sunday, with the Bears playing later. The other sledders packed snow together to build a jump, and poured water on it for added momentum. Skidding a glove across the snow, saliva freezing on your coat zipper, it was like the ground was punching up at us when me and Real Dad’s sled plunged toward the jump, and then everything went quiet and airborne, and that, I guess, was family for three seconds.
But Mom’s shower gulps to a stop. Fake Dad No. 3 sets his vitamin jars on the kitchen table, and I dive under my bed covers and pretend I’ve been asleep. And the next day, I totally Walk Down Faggot Lane when I meet Toby at the Airplane Booth.
“Something about a retreat sounded kind of interesting,” I tell him. “Wouldn’t you be almost relieved? To walk away completely?”
A French fry falls out of Toby’s mouth. I blush for even bringing up the subject. Blush enough to come back home and tell Fake Dad No. 3: “I don’t think so.”
“But you’re considering it,” Fake Dad No. 3 says. “I can see it in your face; view of the lake? Simple breakfast in the morning? I’ll bring pamphlets! I’m eager to help.”
Eager to help. Like he, Necro, and Garrett Alfieri can walk into a room, offer help, and expect everyone to start licking themselves in strange tongues.
“Nothing against you, but a retreat sounds stupid to me,” I say, a little harder.
Tell me I need some retreat, when, later, I go to bed, and I’m staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling and I get this tickly feeling. Like how after any party, I’d walk home, wishing the world was a quiet, empty lit town where the sun never came up and high school kids walked around outside. Cutting through store lots and peoples’ backyards, I’d start to talk to myself, whispering one-liners—“Nine out of every ten sportscasters prefer Just For Men Beard Coloring!”—whispering louder and louder and louder.